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Greek garden

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Greek gardens were created in ancient Greece, and Hellenistic gardens were created in late classical times under the influence of Greek culture. Relatively little is known about either type of garden.

Minoan gardens

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Before the coming of Proto-Greeks into the Aegean area, Minoan culture depicted gardens, in the form of subtly tamed, wild-looking landscapes. These gardens were shown in frescoes, notably in a stylized, floral, sacred landscape with some Egyptianizing features; this landscape was represented in the fragments of a Middle Minoan fresco at Amnisos, northeast of Knossos.[1] In the east wing of the palace at Phaistos, fissures and tool-trimmed holes may once have been made. In the post-Minoan world, Mycenaean art concentrated on human interactions, while the natural world took a reduced role;[2] following the collapse of Mycenaean palace culture and the associated loss of literacy, pleasure gardens were probably not a feature of the Greek Dark Age.

Literature

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Further information: Garden of Alcinous

In the eighth century BC, the works of Homer included a reference to gardens—the Neverland of Alcinous, in the mythical Phaeacia. This region was as distant from the world of Homer's listeners as was the heroic world of Achaeans that he recreated, with significant poetic license:[3] "We live far off", said Nausicaa, "surrounded by the stormy sea, the outermost of men, and no other mortals have dealing with us."[4]

Now, you'll find a splendid grove along the road—

poplars, sacred to Pallas—
a bubbling spring's inside and meadows run around it.
There lies my father's estate, his blossoming orchard too,

as far from town as a man's strong shout can carry.[5]

The mythical gardens of the palace possessed a surreal lushness; they were located in the fenced orchard outside the courtyard, facing the tall gates:

Here luxuriant trees are always in their prime

pomegranates and pears, and apples glowing red,
succulent figs and olives swelling sleek and dark.
And the yield of all these trees will never flag or die,

neither in winter nor in summer, a harvest all year round.[6]

This description is popular with writers on gardens, whether real or imaginary.[7]

Poetic descriptions of Greek landscapes and flora are well known from ancient stories:

Nevertheless, it was only in the Hellenistic era that gardeners first wrote treatises on their work, called kepourika.[8]

Homer's contemporaries were unfamiliar with such gardens, according to archaeologists, or with palaces such as Alcinous' (with bronze doors). The gardens of Greek myth were untended,[9] orderly in style because order (themis) was assumed to be a natural principle. An example was the orchard of the Hesperides.

Classical Greece

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Archaeologists have identified no planted courtyards in palaces from Mycenean culture or in Greek houses from the Classical period. When a symposium on Roman gardens[10] mentioned expected Greek precursors, one reviewer observed[11], "For all practical purposes there appear to have been no gardens of any sort in Greek city homes, beyond perhaps a few pots with plants." Apart from vegetable plots and orchards, there is some literary and archaeological evidence for public or semi-public gardens linked to sanctuaries (temenos). In fifth- and fourth-century Athens, some public places were planted with trees;[12] as Plato suggested in his Laws, "The fountains of water, whether of rivers or springs, shall be ornamented with plantings and buildings for beauty".

Temple of Hephaestus, Athens, replanted with myrtle and pomegranates in the 3rd-century planting pits

In 1936, the area around the Temple of Hephaestus at Athens was excavated down to bare rock. Rectangular planting pits were identified in this rock; these pits ran around three sides of the temple (but not the front) and were aligned with the temple columns. In the column bases were the shattered remains of flower pots in which layered stems had previously rooted. However, related coinage shows that the earliest of these plantings were not made until the third century BC.[13] By that time, in mainland Greece and Ionia, the influence of Achaemenid Persia predominated in humanly-tended gardens. In the previous century, by contrast, Plutarch made the following observation about Alexander the Great:[14] as a boy, he would ask Persian visitors to his father's court in Macedon about Persian roads and military organization—but never about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Herodotus, who probably visited Babylon in the mid-fifth century, does not mention these hanging gardens.[15] Xenophon, under Achaemenid Persian influence,[16] planted a grove when he returned to Athens. There is a myth, set in Macedon, of Silenus being found drunk by Midas; this myth can be dated to the Hellenistic period by its setting, a rose garden.

In Athens, the first private pleasure gardens appear in literary sources from the fourth century.[17] Plato's Academy was situated in an ancient grove of plane trees that was sacred to an archaic hero, Akademos. Sacred groves were never actively planted, but had existed since the remote past and were regarded as sacred.[18] These groves do not figure in the history of gardens, except for supporting contemplation or intellectual discourse. By contrast, the olive trees at the academy were reputedly planted as slips from the sacred olive tree at the Erechtheum. The grounds of the academy were bordered by walls for ritual reasons, as pleasure gardens would be for practical reasons. Within the academy's boundaries were multiple buildings: small temples, shrines, and tombs (including that of Akademos).

In 322 BC, Theophrastus—the "father of botany"—inherited Aristotle's garden, scholars, and library. Little is known about this garden except that it contained a walk and that Theophrastus lectured there; it may have been partly a botanical garden, with a scientific rather than recreational purpose. When he returned to Athens in 306 BCE, the philosopher Epicurus founded The Garden, a school named after his garden that was located between the Stoa and Plato's Academy, which served as the academy's meeting place. Little is known about Epicurus' garden, though in later cultural history it grew in reputation: about his garden Les Délices in Geneva, Voltaire said enthusiastically, "It is the palace of a philosopher with the gardens of Epicurus—it is a delicious retreat".[19]

Gardens of Adonis, under Syrian influence, were simple plantings of herbal seedlings grown in saucers and pots. When these seedlings collapsed in the heat of summer, it was a signal for female adherents of Adonis to begin mourning rituals. These were not gardens in a classic sense.

Hellenistic gardens

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Harpalus, Alexander's successor at Babylon, grew some Greek plants in the royal palace and walks;[20] but mainland Greece was not the originator of European gardens. The greatest Hellenistic garden was created by the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria: a grand, walled, Edenic landscape, which included the Library of Alexandria, part of the Musaeum. Water-powered automata and water organs featured in Hellenistic gardens, toys devised by technicians such as Hero of Alexandria. (Significantly, Hero also designed machinery for theatres.) In late classical times, the peristyle form predominated in large private houses. A peristyle was a paved courtyard surrounded by a roofed colonnade; this courtyard eventually contained potted plants, a Persian and Egyptian innovation. The peristyle was used for palaces and gymnasia.

Roman decorative gardening first appeared after the Romans encountered garden traditions in the Hellenistic Near East.[citation needed]

References

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  1. ^ Maria C. Shaw, "The Aegean Garden" American Journal of Archaeology 97.4 (October 1993:661-685); see also J. Schäfer, "The role of 'gardens' in Minoan civilisation", in V. Karageorghis, The Civilisations of the Aegean and their diffusion in Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean 2000-600 B.C. (Larnaca, 1992:85-87).
  2. ^ "Mycenaean art of the later Bronze Age (Late Helladic III) plays a lesser role in my considerations, largely because it copies from earlier art and because its themes are concerned more with people and their actions than with nature" (Shaw 1993:662).
  3. ^ M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1954, 1965) examines the created cultural world of the epic tradition, which Finley sees as neither authentically Mycenaean nor an accurate reflection of Homer's eighth century BCE.
  4. ^ Odyssey VI. 205.
  5. ^ Robert Fagles' translation; "town" is Fagles' license: no such settlement was known to Homer's hearers.
  6. ^ Robert Fagles' translation, p. 183.
  7. ^ It is quoted by Dorothy Burr Thompson and Ralph E. Griswold, Garden Lore of Ancient Athens (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1963), p. 5: "In it flourish tall trees: pears and pomegranates and apples full of fruit, also sweet figs and bounteous olives...Here too a fertile vineyard has been planted...Beyond the last row of trees, well laid garden plots have been arranged, blooming all the year with flowers. And there are two springs; one leads through the garden while the other dives beneath the threshold of the great court to gush out beside the stately palace; from it the citizens draw their water"
  8. ^ Garden Lore of Ancient Athens. American School of Classical Studies. p. 5.
  9. ^ Noted by Thacker, p. 9.
  10. ^ Elizabeth B. Macdougall and h Wilhelmina Jashemski, eds. Ancient Roman Gardens (series Colloquia on the History of Landscape Architecture 7), Dumbarton Oaks, 1981).
  11. ^ Norman Neuerburg, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42.2 (May 1983:200); Neuerburg's summary: "To this reviewer even the Greek antecedents scarcely explain the subsequent Roman development of the art of the decorative garden."
  12. ^ Trees that were landmarks mentioned in inscriptions are briefly noted by Thompson and Griswold 1963, p. 9.
  13. ^ Thompson and Griswold 1963, p. 10 and illustrations. The planting was restored with myrtle and pomegranates.
  14. ^ Plutarch, Moralia, 342b, noted by Julian Reade, "Alexander the Great and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon", Iraq 62 (2000:195-217) p. 195
  15. ^ Herodotus and Xenophon (in his romanticised Cyropaedia) do give extensive accounts of Cyrus the Great's palatial city of Pasargadae and its gardens.
  16. ^ In his Anabasis, Xenophon introduced into Greek the Old Persian term for an enclosed royal hunting park, paradeisos.
  17. ^ Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens p. 18, notes the Academy, the gardens of Theophrastus and of Epicurus.
  18. ^ Much later, in the first century CE, Nero included pseudo-sacred groves in his artificial landscaping of Domus Aurea.
  19. ^ Voltaire, letter of 23 January 1755, quoted by Thacker, p. 18.
  20. ^ τά βαςίλεια καὶ τους περιπάτους (Plutarch, Life of Alexander 35). His unsuccessful attempt to grow ivy in the withering heat of Mesopotamia, was probably for its associations with Dionysos rather than as a garden ground-cover.

Further reading

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  • Birge, Darice Elizabeth (1982). Sacred Groves in the Ancient Greek World. PhD diss., Univ. of California at Berkeley.
  • Bonnechere, Pierre. (2007). "The Place of the Sacred Grove (Alsos) in the Mantic Rituals of Greece: The Example of the Alsos of Trophonios at Lebadeia (Boeotia)." In Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency. Edited by Michel Conan, 17–41. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
  • Bowe, Patrick. (2010). "The Evolution of the Ancient Greek Garden." Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 30.3: 208–223.
  • Calame, Claude. (2007). "Gardens of Love and Meadows of the Beyond: Ritual Encounters with the Gods and Poetical Performances in Ancient Greece." In Sacred Gardens and Landscapes: Ritual and Agency. Edited by Michel Conan, 43–54. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
  • Carroll-Spillecke, Maureen. (1992). "The Gardens of Greece from Homeric to Roman Times." Journal of Garden History 12.2: 84–101.
  • Giesecke, Annette L. (2007). The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard Univ.
  • Gleason, Kathryn L. (2013). A Cultural History of Gardens in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Osborne, Robin. (1992). "Classical Greek Gardens: Between Farm and Paradise." In Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods. Edited by John Dixon Hunt, 373–391. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
  • Porter, Ray. (2000). "The Flora of the Theran Wall Paintings: Living Plants and Motifs—Sea Lily, Crocus, Iris and Ivy." In The Wall Paintings of Thera. Vol. 2. Edited by Susan Sherratt, 603–630. Athens, Greece: Thera Foundation.
  • Shaw, Maria C. (1993). "The Minoan Garden." American Journal of Archaeology 97.4: 661–685.
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Library resources about
Greek gardens
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